Home
Menu

Cavendish Space

Print the deck

The whole deck at playing-card size, nine to a sheet, ready to cut. Nothing to choose, because a deck is a deck.

The whole deck, at the size it is drawn

95 cards on 15 sheets, nine to a page, at 2.5 × 3.5 in (63.5 × 88.9 mm) — standard playing-card size. They fit a normal card sleeve, a normal card box, and a normal hand.

There is nothing to choose on this page. A deck is a deck: same cards, same size, same order every time. Print it, cut it, use it.

Before you print.

  • Set the scale to 100%, not “fit to page.” This is the one that goes wrong. Browsers shrink by default, and a deck printed at 94% no longer fits a sleeve or a box.
  • Set margins to Minimum or None. A sheet is 7.5 × 10.5 in, which fits US Letter and A4 alike inside a quarter-inch margin — the same file for both, no setting to pick.
  • US Letter is the tight one. Eleven inches less two quarter-inch margins is 10.5 exactly, with nothing spare. If your printer cannot reach within a quarter inch of the short edge it will shave the bottom row. A4 has three-quarters of an inch to spare; use it if you have it, or print the bottom row's sheet again on a printer that can.
  • Use card, not paper. 250–300 gsm (about 90–110 lb cover) handles like a card and survives being laid out and swept up a hundred times. Plain paper curls by the second session.

What is on which sheet

A sheet never mixes realms. That costs a few part-full pages across the deck and buys the thing this page would otherwise need a control for: to print one realm, print its pages.

  • Interaction — sheet 1
  • Places — sheet 2
  • Weather — sheets 3–5
  • What helps — sheets 6–9
  • Lily pads — sheets 10–11
  • Growers — sheet 12
  • Kind words — sheets 13–14
  • Blank — sheet 15

The sheets

Cutting

  • The hairlines are the cuts. They run the full width and height of the sheet, so every cut is one straight line through three cards at once.
  • Cut the rows first, then the columns. Three long cuts each way turns a sheet into nine cards, and the cards stay square. Cutting one card out at a time is how a deck ends up with nine different sizes.
  • A guillotine or a rotary trimmer beats scissors, and a metal ruler with a craft knife beats both for a single sheet.
  • Optional: a corner rounder, 3 mm radius. It is the difference between cards that look homemade and cards that look made, and it stops the corners going furry.

The backs, if you want them

You do not need these. The deck's privacy rule is that face-down cards are indistinguishable — a spread must not leak before its person turns a card up — and blank card stock does that perfectly well. Print backs only if you want the finished object.

If you do: every card in a realm shares one back, so a back sheet is the same image nine times. That means alignment cannot go wrong — it does not matter which way the paper turns over. Print the faces, feed the stack back in, print the matching back sheet, and check one card against the light before you run the rest.

Two realms carry their own back on purpose, and both are realms that are never laid face-down: Kind words, which is given or claimed, and Interaction, which is worn and shown. Everything else shares the standard back. That is why a distinct back is safe for those two and nowhere else.

Then what

  • The guidebook — every card, what it names, and how to hold it. Print it or keep it open beside the deck.
  • The facilitator sheet — for whoever is holding the space, with the play modes on it.
  • Interaction badges — the one realm meant to be worn rather than laid down, at conference badge size.
  • The web deck — the same cards, if you would rather not print anything at all.